Monday, March 9, 2009

ばか姉ちゃん

I keep doing many ばか姉ちゃん things, but the very latest one is misspelling kanji.O_o...

I keep forgetting to figure out how to install a Japanese spell checker, so I make quite a lot of mistakes when I write in Japanese. (*Goes off to read for spell checker support for Leopard.*) Some of them are the kind of mistakes that the spell checker won't pick up on, for example when I write the wrong kanji by accident. The recent one is writing 言 instead of 行, and visa versa.(- -);~ I guess it's easy to make these when you type. If I write by hand, I need to think carefully which kanji to write, but when I type and just hit space, sometimes I see a familiar kanji and don't realize that while familiar, it's the wrong one.

I guess I'll try to be more careful when writing from now on.

It's such a strange feeling though, writing in a language I don't know well and I don't have the tools to verify carefully. With English and Russian I have always been very careful, because I think there is nothing worse than безграмотность (illiteracy and ignorance). When I see native speakers making grammatical and spelling errors it makes me wonder about these people. So I kind of try not to think of what my Japanese friends think of my own illiteracy in Japanese. Surely I am a foreigner, so people make some discount for that, but still there are limits to illiteracy, I think.~ Although regardless of how much I worry of what people think of me and my language abilities, I'll still continue to write my diary in Japanese on mixi, because if nothing else it forces me to look into the dictionary more often, and to check my grammar resources too. It's not something I can do as easily when I speak.

I am so glad my friend introduced me to mixi a year ago. It's been really helping me study, and my friends on mixi have been very kind to point out my mistakes.